Monday, March 18, 2013

Always

Here's my new animation "Always" for my music and animation project The Least of Creatures.
With this video, which is my first in nearly a year and a half, I wanted to shift away from the simpler, more graphic videos I've done before (to see the other videos, visit vimeo.com/leastofcreatures) and make it a much more cinematic experience. While I had done mostly visuals paired with some sort of kinetic type, I wanted it to be a straightforward narrative that could very well stand on its own, with or without the song (though I'd prefer that it be with the song, thank you very much)
The song is essentially about meeting someone special and how you quickly you can find yourself falling head over heels. You can reexamine all the little moments that led up to it, but it still seems that the universe happened to align just right so that you could meet one another.
With the video, I wanted to tell that same story, but in an exaggerated way. I also wanted to take all that I've learned from my job as a storyboard artist and apply it to the animation. I wanted to have it read as though it were a short film I had shot. I very actively tried to replicate and reference shots from movies and TV. Here's a small cheat sheet with the frame paired with the one it references.

It's definitely by far the best and most complex thing I've done in terms of my animation (in the end, the animation was comprised of over 1200 individual drawings) While animation is still purely a hobby, I would love to keep pushing myself farther in what I can do with it.
And if you like the song, you can download it for FREE at https://soundcloud.com/theleastofcreatures/always